Oshyn’s Christian Burne Talks Digital Trust on the Content Cocktail Hour Podcast

Oshyn’s CTO, Christian Burne, appeared on this week’s episode of The Content Cocktail Hour podcast, hosted by AudiencePlus’ Jonathan Gandolf.

Christian and Jonathan discussed Oshyn’s Digital Trust Index report and the importance of companies prioritizing their digital experience in building trust.

You can watch the full episode below or listen via your favorite podcast platform: Apple | Spotify | YouTube

Transcript

Jonathan Gandolf: Welcome back to The Content Cocktail Hour. This is Jonathan Gandalf here, co-founder and CEO of Audience Plus. I'm thrilled to be joined today by a CTO. I think this might be the second CTO we've had on. You know, not the typical title we have here, but I'm excited for this conversation myself, more of a technical marketer, although probably, Christian, not nearly as technical as you. But I am excited to learn a lot from you today. But we're thrilled to be joined by Christian Burn, CTO of Oshyn. They just released a really cool piece of content. I think there's some lessons there that we as marketers can glean. I might mention some of those throughout today's conversation, but we're going to dig into the results today and see what we can all learn from that report.

Christian, before we jump into that conversation, maybe in your own words, tell us a little bit about you and your role at Oshyn.

Christian Burne: Sure. First of all, thanks for having me, Jonathan. I appreciate it. My role at Oshyn: I'm the Chief Technology Officer. I lead the technical delivery of our projects. We're a service provider for companies. We mainly build websites and mobile apps based on their marketing strategy. We do the implementation. So, in my role, I'm focused on our team creating high-quality software: scalable websites for our customers that are both high-performing and secure. And that's the genesis of this digital trust index report that we created.

JG: Awesome. We're going to dig into that. But Christian, this is the Content Cocktail Hour, so before we do that, I have to ask you, what are you enjoying drinking nowadays?

CB: Oh, well, I'm here in Southern California. We have a great little brewery called Beachwood Brewing Company, and they have a beer called 28 Haze Later that’s one of my favorite beers right at the moment.

JG: Is it a hazy IPA?

CB: Yeah.

JG: Oh, love that. I…actually, in a previous life, I helped found a brewery, which I've talked about a little bit on this show, so I'm always down to trade some brewery tips and tricks. So love that. Next time I'm out there, I'll have to see if I can find that one.

Well, let's jump into the Digital Trust Index. You previewed it a little bit, but maybe let's just start there. What exactly was it? What led you to want to create this index? And maybe just give us an overview of what the report is and what led you to it.

CB: Sure. Yeah, so it's called the Digital Trust Index, and the overarching objective of the report is to show companies how their website stacks up against other websites across three key areas. The three key areas are performance, accessibility, and security.

And these three areas together build up what we call the digital trust that a brand has created with their consumers. By doing really well in all three of these areas, they're establishing a strong bond of trust with their users, allowing them to feel great when they come back to their website over and over again, that the company is caring for their digital hygiene, their digital data, and making sure that they're having the best performance, the best experience possible. And if they don't do well on these, then basically what we're trying to tell companies is you're actually sending a message to your users that you do not care about their digital experience by not taking good care of these three areas.

So what we do is we run a scan. It's only metrics that we can glean from the outside. So, of course, we're not going deep into the inner workings of these websites. Like, we're not able to say how they are storing the data on their servers. And we're not doing that. But we're able to identify how they're taking care with their experience between the website and the user's browser, gathering all the signals we can from that and scoring companies' websites based on that information.

JG: I love what you mentioned there about the trust factor that you're building with your visitors, your users. I think we all know the extreme version of how that trust is broken, you know, in data breaches or hacks. But more implicitly, how does that play out when somebody's not doing a good job on performance, accessibility, and trust? What are the signals?

CB: Yeah, you know, it happens without you even thinking about it. When you're on a website, you click on a link and you're going one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, and it's not there yet. Bam, you're off. You're going somewhere else. You know, it has to be there. And when it does render on the screen, it has to look right. So, looking right means you have to make sure that you're testing across all the browsers. But that's the easy part. Testing across browsers, people who have some disabilities, I'm getting older now. I'm almost 50. I'm looking at websites and, oh my goodness, this text is too small. Or they put white text on a picture that has a light blue background, and you can't read it. So, it's not even doing those things means that customers aren't getting the experience that you want them to get. And, if you do that too many times, they're going to go somewhere else. They're not going to come back to your website.

JG: Yeah, I love that. It's almost subconscious, that experience of a page just taking slightly too long to load. I'm not thinking, "Oh, this brand isn't worth anything," but I'm kind of impatient and wondering how legit this is. It's an almost subconscious experience that we're all having as that visitor.

CB: Right, and customers have options. You know, if the experience, the only way they're going to come back to you is if you're the only place where they can get it. But if they can get it somewhere else and they're they're not getting a good experience on your website, then they'll go somewhere else.

JG: Yeah, and we as marketers, myself included, we're probably too often indexing on, no pun intended, on brand and look-and-feel, and how creative our site is. And I think sometimes we are probably guilty of overlooking the accessibility, the performance, etc. on the site. So what were some of the big findings for you? What made you raise your eyebrows as you're going through this report? What are some of the key takeaways that you and the team found from this exercise?

CB: Well, one of the things we found is that, unsurprisingly, companies that have had data breaches, had security issues, they rank high on the security score. But surprisingly, that doesn't mean that they score high on everything else. It means they really drilled down on doing well on security, but not necessarily taking care to think, “okay, I'm thinking about my entire customer experience.” They really just fixed the problem. And so that's part of what we're trying to get across with this is to think about it holistically. Think about that message you're building for your customers. Nobody has everything taken care of. There's always somebody underperforming on at least one of the indexes. And typically, everybody has accessibility errors. So that's a key area where companies need to improve their users' experience on the accessibility side. Ten percent of the companies have 40 or more contrast errors and 135 warnings on their website. So, there are lots of areas for improvement that can happen here. It's also across industry. There's not really one industry that was better than another. And within industries, there's going to be a high degree of variation. And the thing is, Jonathan, this is really not difficult to fix. If you know what's wrong, you can fix it pretty easily. It's not like a multi-month project to address these things. So they all can be addressed.

JG: So why don't businesses know? Is it just an education? A matter of education? Or is it a matter of prioritization? Like, why don't businesses know how easy some of this is to fix, and why aren't they doing it?

CB: It's prioritization for sure. People aren't taking this as seriously as they should. And that's why we're trying to shine a light on it. But there's also a skill gap. Lots of IT teams do not have the skills to do this. I can say it's pretty easy, because this is something we do all the time. But if you're internal to a company, you may not know exactly how — not even know how to do it — but you might not know how to even measure it.

That's why we have this free tool on our website that lets companies type in their URL and get these statistics for their own website, so they can measure it themselves on an ongoing basis.

JG: I love that. Yeah, I love that you're kind of giving away that knowledge. We'll be sure to get that link in the show notes and encourage everybody to go check it out. On that note, you mentioned this report was Fortune 1000 brands. What about companies who are smaller? Maybe just smaller in that or maybe companies that are just starting out or going through a website project? What advice do you have for them from what you've learned here from the Fortune 1000?

CB: Well, we've split it up by industry, so you can look in the report and see how companies, the Fortune 1000, in your industry are performing – or in the closest industry to you are performing. And you can measure your own website against that. So, I definitely encourage people to go to our site, and there's lots of tools on the internet that you can use, not just ours. Ours happens to be one that brings these metrics together. Most of the other ones you'll find are separate. You'll have an accessibility checker or a performance checker, but you know, they all work well and largely it's this. It's a lot of the same data. But go there, scan your website, and if you're a marketer, ask your development team, “hey, here's some things that I think we should fix.” And if you're a developer, it's really things that you could probably Google and fix pretty quickly if you're motivated to make it happen and get it done.

JG: I know what I'm going to be doing as soon as we hit stop here. I'm going to go check that out, maybe a bit nervously or anxiously, but I'm going to go check that out for myself and our new site.

CB: Also, we use this in a lot of our new relationships as a way to both establish trust, and set a baseline for what we can do to improve and lift every system we touch. The first thing we do is scan our customers and then incrementally try to improve it over time. And that's what we recommend every company do. You know, you could do it all at once, but you don't have to. You can do it over time. The saying is something like, “you can't improve it if you can't measure it.” So just start measuring it and improve it over time.

JG: Yep. Measure what matters. I love that. It's a benchmark or success metric that you get to share. So that's really cool.

CB: Exactly.

JG: Okay. You and I had a little bit of a prep conversation before hitting record here. I can't believe I didn't bring this up as a topic. So I'm going to throw this curveball at you. But we're 13 minutes into a conversation about tech and we haven't mentioned AI yet. Maybe from the CTO’s seat, I'm just curious, especially as it pertains to web experiences, right? I know there are extreme opinions or hypotheses out there that websites will go away, right? With all things AI and AI chat and how people are building websites is being changed. I'm going to throw this over the fence at you. I'm not sure if there's an explicit question here, but what impact is AI having on everything that you're doing at Oshyn and with your customers? And then maybe like I'd be curious from the CTO seat, how are you staying on top of how quickly everything is changing right beneath us?

CB: Right, it's true that it's a large force in the industry right now, and it's true that it impacts many different aspects of what we do. So, just straight from the content creation side, we create a lot of content around our knowledge and our experience. And the introduction of AI led to lots of conversations about how to use it. What is the best practice for using it? And we used to have difficulty getting our engineers to write content, and now they write all kinds of content. They write so much content that our marketing team is saying, "Slow down, you're creating more work for me by generating all of this AI content,” because we don't want to be the company that goes out there and just has a bunch of generic AI content. So our marketing team has to go through that. Our developers — our delivery team — are using it more to enable their code to make them more efficient, more effective. And that's a good use of the capability. Also, in the scanning of the websites, there's lots of AI capabilities in the tools that we use to help our customers keep them secure and highly performant. So, a lot of code scanning capabilities that we use as part of our daily work.

And that all gets brought in. The bigger picture, though, is “will we actually still be building websites anymore?” And I don't have an answer to that. I don't know if anybody has an answer to that. But you know, we have to keep our pulse on what's happening to make sure, because that could change the whole paradigm of customers publishing websites for users to consume. If it goes away, it changes all of content marketing. It changes all of SEO. It changes how customers find brands. So that's much bigger. We keep our eye on that, but also we still have to deliver every day for our customers – and our customers are demanding we be more efficient by leveraging the software; do more with less. And that's what we're trying to do and how we're trying to leverage it right now.

JG: I think that's smart. It's kind of the opinion I've tried to form, too. I've always said I don't want to form an opinion too strong on AI that I'm not able to change it at a later date. I don't want to die on the wrong hill when it comes to AI. And I think there are a lot of people who are planting their flag on what AI is going to be or what it already is. And I like that you’re taking an open-minded approach to it; like we're going to keep our eye on it. We're going to be up to date on it. But we also have to deliver day in and day out for our customers. We're going to use AI to deliver better results for our customer. And I really appreciate that perspective.

CB: Yeah, I don't have any customers who've asked us to… you know, me and a couple of co-workers were talking, “what if there's going to be such a personalized website that you go to a URL and every piece of information you see is generated by AI? And when you click on something, the next web page is generated by AI?” Every request, every URL that a customer sees. That's not out of the realm of possibility. You could see that happening.

So you know, I don't have any customers asking us to do that yet, so maybe they will.

JG: Yeah, it makes my brain melt a little bit, so we'll save that topic for a follow-up episode, because that's when I start getting…it's crazy, but I think you're exactly right. And I think the logic is all there. I was talking to somebody about this last night. It feels so far-fetched, but then you start talking through the logic of some of these big changes, and you're like, "Oh no, that logically all the steps are there." It's crazy.

CB: There's a clear line between where you are now and where you could be. It's no longer fuzzy or undefined.

JG: Christian, this has been a lot of fun. We always ask our guests what's an unpopular opinion that you have as it pertains to – typically I say B2B sales, sales, or marketing – but from the CTO seat. I'll let you take it in whichever direction you feel like you've got the hottest take on.

CB: Yeah, one thing that we hear a lot about in digital marketing and website creation is customers asking us about composable and headless websites. This is the pre-AI era, pre-AI-generated website era. This is the era we're in now.

JG: The good old days.

CB: Right, and one opinion that Oshyn has out there is that headless websites aren't for everybody. It does have a significant benefit on performance. There are ways that you can get performance without going headless. Headless is the easiest way to get the largest performance gain. But that has to be an important aspect of your digital experience for your customers in order for you to do that. It's a large change in how you manage and maintain your website, so it's just not for everyone. And I think you need to understand the implications before you dive in and change your whole digital experience to a headless or composable digital experience. There are benefits, and it does make sense for a lot of people, just not everyone.

JG: Yeah, love that. I think that was one of those things that became very popular very fast, and I think some people just adopted it because it was becoming very popular very fast. I think we go through these cycles on a lot of things, and so I appreciate that advice and perspective.

Christian, if people want to learn more about Oshyn or learn more from you, what's the best way to do that?

CB: Oh okay, just go to our website. That's the easiest thing. So www.oshyn.com.

And then for the Digital Trust Index, it's oshyn.com/trust.

JG: Cool, love that. We will get all of those links in the show notes. I encourage everybody to go run their own scan.

Christian, thanks for sitting down and taking time on the Content Cocktail Hour. To all of our watchers, all of our listeners, until next time, same time, same place, cheers. Thanks.